by Glenn Meade
“No. Any reason why?”
“Kyle served in Iraq with Kath’s husband and her dad. Something happened to him over there. Nobody’s sure what. But he suffered from PTSD afterward. Kath’s husband Jack suffered with it, too, but Kyle was a lot worse, his head really messed up. One day, they found him hanging from a tree in Admiral Farragut Park. When they cut him down, he was barely alive. The doctors tried their best, but he wound up brain-damaged from lack of oxygen.”
“You OK, Courtney?”
“Why?”
“You look . . . upset.”
Courtney wiped the edge of her left eye with the tip of her nail. “Kyle and I were close. We were engaged.”
“I’m sorry. I guess her mom took it bad, too? What happened there?”
“She shot herself on the afternoon of Kath’s wedding. You’d think the crazy cow would have waited until her daughter’s wedding was long over before she plugged herself, but no, she had to mess up everything, go out all dramatic, gun blazing, so to speak. But that was Martha Beth.”
“That’s tough.”
“Yeah, no doo-doo.”
“Kath’s mom had problems, I guess.”
“You can say that again. I’ve known people who thought she was nuts. Personally, I figured she just drank too much, which can make you crazy enough. I’ve no idea what went through her mind that made her put a gun to her head. Maybe Kyle’s situation, maybe not. Factor in that her husband lost a foot to a grenade blast in Iraq and retired early and that she was drinking like a parched camel. I figure she was head-banged by a truckload of problems that tormented her. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have drilled a hole in her own skull. Although I heard rumors.”
Tanner arched his eyebrows.
Courtney said, “My mom told me that she knew Martha Beth tried to kill herself a whole bunch of times over the years. She could be a drama queen. I guess you might say an attention seeker.”
“Sounds like Kath had some pretty heavy stuff to deal with.”
“How she came through it all I’ll never know. It got worse when her husband and kids disappeared. By rights, she ought to be in a rubber room somewhere, banging her head off the walls. But she’s coped, which says a lot for her.” Courtney shrugged. “Me, I’d have been a basket case, getting so much electroconvulsive therapy the lights would be dimming all the way to Idaho.”
Tanner offered a nod. “You knew her mom well?”
“Yeah.”
“And her father?”
Courtney nodded.
“You knew him, too?”
“Yeah, pretty well.”
“What’s the matter?” Tanner said. “You seemed to ball up a little when I asked that question.”
“Ball up?”
“Tighten. Like a fist.”
“I don’t believe I did.”
“So tell me about her old man.”
“Nothing much to tell. It’s all in the original report. You read it, didn’t you?”
Tanner nodded. “But you got on OK with him? I mean, is her old man a likable guy?”
Courtney said nothing.
Tanner nodded. “Why do I get the feeling he’s not a subject you want to dwell on?”
“Cut the psychoanalysis, Tanner. It’s bull. He’s not what’s important right now.” Courtney looked out the window, toward the hotel parking lot, then back again. “There’s something else. Kath told me that Jack seemed a little anxious before he left on that trip and disappeared.”
“Did she know what he was anxious about?”
“No, but Jack got that way now and then, with PTSD. He’d be on edge. Maybe suffer bad nightmares or bouts of paranoia.”
“What was he paranoid about?”
“Kath said he’d get irrational fears that he was going to die, or he’d get distrustful of others or think that his phone was bugged. It’s not unusual with PTSD. But he learned some skills from an Army psychologist he saw. It helped him cope with his problems.”
“How about Kath? How’s she coped since?”
Courtney took a sip of her coffee and pushed her cup away. “Are you married, Tanner?”
“My wife passed a few years back.”
“When you lose a family member close to you, that’s tough enough. But when you lose your entire family, why, that’s a trainload of grief dumped on your doorstep. We never really get over devastating loss, do we?”
“I guess not.”
Courtney paused before she spoke. “You never met a woman so in love with her family as Kath. She just adored the ground Sean and Amy walked on. She even became a teacher so she’d have more time for them in summer and on holidays. Losing the three people she loved was pretty rough on Kath. It was like she stopped breathing. I figure for a time, she wished she had.”
“Survivor’s guilt?”
“If you mean did she blame herself, yes, she did.”
“For what?”
“Allowing the children to take the trip. She was bogged down in work, trying to get some peaceful time to write, so she let them go. She’s never really gotten over that decision. I think she’s always tortured herself with the question ‘What if I hadn’t let them go?’ I don’t think she’s written a word since. And it took her a long time to find her way back. I mean, she never even had bodies to bury. She couldn’t cope, couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t function.”
“How’d she pull through it?”
“With a lot of pain and a lot of effort.”
“You helped her?”
“As much as I could. Look, Tanner, can we get down to some real business here?”
“I got a call from Dexter at the NTSB.”
“And?”
“They did a thorough search of the area using ground radar but found no remains.”
“So they made it out.”
“Seems likely.”
Courtney considered.
Tanner said, “You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”
“I figure Quentin Lusk didn’t just drive down to the lake to admire the views. I reckon he may have had a preplanned alternative escape-route bolt hole, a backup in case things went wrong and he needed another way to get out of Dodge.”
“So?”
Courtney waved her notebook. “So I took a drive out to the marina. I did some snooping in the office and got a list of boat owners.”
“And?”
“Two of the berthed vessels are unaccounted for in terms of ownership. I checked, and it turns out the owner of one of them moved overseas. The one that’s left was berthed right at the end of the marina, only no one seems to know who it belongs to. An old Dorsett Catalina.”
“Nice boat.”
“I took a look on board. You need to see what I found.”
57
* * *
The study looked like a command post. I knew Chad used it to communicate with his security business’s outposts abroad.
On the right wall was a plaque in polished silver: “Keep your enemies close but your friends even closer.”
It was Chad’s motto, one he often liked to quote.
In one corner, at least three computers were switched on, their screens glowing blue, leather office chairs in front of them. In the center was a lounge area with two comfortable three-seater couches facing each other. In the middle was an Arabic coffee table, carved out of walnut, inlaid with gold and ivory and delicate filigree work. An Apple laptop was open on the table. I knew Chad sometimes worked from here, alone or with several of his employees.
“You busy?”
He gave a shrug, and the brief shadow of a smile registered on his face. “Like I always say, there’s a lot of insecurity driving the security business. Terrorism’s made an ugly comeback everywhere. Business is always brisk when the bad boys are up to no good. Coffee?”
/>
“No, thanks. I’m really stuck for time, Chad.”
“Take a seat, Kath.” He indicated one of the couches.
I sat, and Chad tugged his pants at the knee as he eased himself onto the couch opposite. That was a typical Chad move, pants tugging at the knee, along with his hands stuck in his blazer pockets. Like you see some upper-class people do—both gestures are Prince Charles’s favorites.
Chad put a hand up to massage his forehead, as if he had a headache or he didn’t know how to start.
“Look, I think I’m going to be straight here, Kath.” He met my stare. “I know this is a difficult time for you, and I know you’re stressed, and the last thing I want to do is heighten that stress. But I’m pretty sure you’ve got questions in your head about all of this, and I simply want to try to help answer them.”
All of this? I hadn’t even told him about the intruder. I wanted to but decided to leave it for now. I wanted him to get to the point.
“Yeah? Well, it’s very kind of you, Chad, but why?”
He must have heard the gripe in my voice, because he said, “There’s no need to let sarcasm or bitterness creep in here, Kath. I’m only trying to help.”
“The way hanging out with models in New York helped?”
“All in the past and my mistake. We’ve been over all that. I know we’ve both moved on. But I still care about you. Care about you a lot.”
“I guess you must like making the same mistakes.”
Chad frowned, but no lines showed. A Botox moment. “If you’re alluding to the woman in the Bentley, she was a client.”
“Really? She’s a pretty good-looking client. Better than a lot of the wealthy Arab royalty in robes I’ve seen you hang out with. Anyway, it’s none of my business.”
It was a bitchy remark, but I couldn’t help it. Still, I regretted it the second I said it. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m tired and stressed out. Can you just get to the point?”
Chad made a steeple of his fingers and looked down at the tips, as if he was trying to muster his thoughts. When he looked up, he kept his fingers together. “Jack was a good man. A good man but a sick man. We both know that.”
“And the point is?”
“I need to be very honest here, Kath. And that honesty may hurt you, but I don’t mean it to.”
“Spit it out.”
He looked away, then back at me. “In the last months that Jack worked for me, I was considering firing him. I never told you. And I never told the police when they came to question me after Jack’s flight disappeared. But it’s true. I had some serious problems with his judgment, his performance, and his ability to do his job.”
“We all know he had problems. Explain exactly.”
“Do I really have to spell this out, Kath? His paranoia was getting worse. He had behavioral issues, too. He’d flare up easily, get angry and argumentative, even with customers. They’d notice and comment. Jack was becoming more troubled. Losing the plot. I put it all down to his PTSD and cut him a lot of slack. But that slack was beginning to run out.”
“So why didn’t you tell the police all that?”
Chad sighed. “I think I knew when the plane disappeared that it had probably crashed. As the weeks and months went by, it seemed less and less important. Besides, I reckon the police figured it out for themselves. I think they suspected, from talking to his colleagues and former comrades, that maybe Jack had purposely caused the crash. Didn’t they discuss that with you?”
I had to admit that they did. It was an angle the police explored after the first few weeks when the aircraft wasn’t found. Then they dropped it. I nodded.
Chad shrugged. “I guess no one wanted to tar-brush Jack. No one wanted to sully a once-good man who had mental-health problems. And he was good. A good soldier, a good friend. But there were incidents in the company—stuff I still can’t talk about because it relates to the security of my clients—that made it clear to me that Jack was a man out of control.”
“We don’t know that Jack deliberately crashed the plane, in case that’s where this might be leading.”
“You’re jumping the gun here. I never said that. Did the investigators suggest that?”
“Not to me. Not this time. At least, not yet.”
“Then I may be barking up the wrong tree. But if he walked away from the crash with the children and he didn’t contact you in all this time, something’s not right. Something caused him to want to hide. Either his mental health was bad, or else he had a powerful motive.”
“What kind of motive?”
Chad shook his head. “I’ve no idea. I’m just throwing it out there, Kath. Trying to make sense of all this.”
“If you suspected Jack had mental-health issues, then why did you let him fly down to New Orleans in the company plane?”
“That’s the thing. I didn’t.”
“What?”
“Jack did that without my authority. I was in Kenya on business when the crash happened, remember?”
I remembered. Chad phoned me the day after the aircraft went missing to say he was flying home at once from Kenya. He wanted to help me any way he could. I’d appreciated his concern.
“Jack took it upon himself to use the aircraft. But I never authorized it. That I did tell the police. I had to. I thought he did it because it was Amy’s birthday. Just a reckless but well-meaning gesture on Jack’s part. But he covered himself.”
“How?”
“He arranged a brief meeting with some New Orleans city officials we did business with. It wasn’t a meeting that was really necessary. It took ten minutes or less, and he was done, but it covered him if anyone queried the use of the aircraft, even though I didn’t authorize it. Regarding the other stuff about Jack’s mental state, I thought it best to bury it. There was no point in dishonoring an old friend.”
“What about the money, the bonds, the priceless mask?”
“I’ve no idea. But now you make me wonder. If they were on board, maybe Jack arranged to pick them up in New Orleans and used the business part of the trip and something as innocuous as celebrating his daughter’s birthday as a cover. He may not have even gotten it all in New Orleans. Offshore-banking havens like the Caymans would be ideal to stash that kind of load.”
Chad tapped some keys on his laptop for quite a few seconds, then turned the screen around to face me. “Take a look.”
A map came up, showing the southern U.S.A. and the Caribbean. A red arrow curved from New Orleans to a point just below Cuba. It said, “Distance from New Orleans to Grand Cayman 919 miles.”
“The company aircraft was laid over in New Orleans for ten hours. Jack could have flown to the Cayman Islands, for all I know, and been there and back in six or seven hours.”
“And you knew nothing about this?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“What made you mention the Caymans? And why would Jack think of flying to that location, assuming he may have?”
“Can I trust you not to speak to anyone if I tell you? And I mean no one.”
“Yes.”
“This is embarrassing.”
“How embarrassing?”
“Sometimes I deal in cash. Clients prefer it that way. They don’t want my services on the books. They want them off the radar and offshore. I’ve had dealings in the Caymans. Jack was aware.”
“What would the IRS think?”
“Exactly. I’d be in deep trouble. Which is why I ask you to keep that confidential.”
Chad always sounded honest and truthful. Which may have been why his father wanted him to go into politics. But of course, he was a businessman, and duplicity almost went with the territory.
I looked at the laptop screen, at the red line from New Orleans to the Cayman Islands. Then I looked back at Chad. A thought hit me hard in the gut. “Offshore-banking h
avens. Money, bonds, a priceless artifact. I’m getting a funny vibe.”
“Yeah?”
“Like, I’m asking myself, is that what this is really all about? Is that the prime reason Jack disappeared? To run off with millions?”
Chad let out a breath. “It’s possible. And it gives me no pleasure to say that, Kath.”
“Why is it possible?”
“Because I’m pretty sure I know where he got the money and the mask. And it wasn’t from me, and it had nothing to do with my business.”
I stared back at him. “You mean he got them from the Caymans or in New Orleans?”
“Jack could have gotten them from a bank vault in the Caymans or even New Orleans, for sure, but I think he had them way before then.”
I looked at him, and I felt lost.
Chad saw my confusion, picked up the laptop, and came to join me. “Scoot over.”
I moved along on the couch and he sat, laying the laptop back down on the coffee table. I could smell his aftershave. Eau Sauvage. I’d always liked it.
“I don’t like showing you this, for lots of reasons. Mostly because it will upset you. I know it still upsets me. But there’s no other way around it.”
For some reason, I looked at the wall plaque with Chad’s motto: “Keep your enemies close but your friends even closer.”
“Get around what?”
“The truth,” Chad said, and tapped the keyboard.
58
* * *
The Apple screen lit up with a media player logo.
A video started to play. Someone was holding a camera or a camera phone as a helicopter descended. The scene below looked like the aftermath of a battle and the remains of a civilian vehicle convoy.
All the vehicles were ablaze, their gas tanks on fire, and riddled with bullet holes. Black, oily smoke filled the air above the charred carcasses of several vehicles. Men in uniforms bundled out of the helicopter, and the cameraman followed, moving through the scene. Some vehicles were crashed, doors were flung open, and bodies lay inside or on the ground. Most of them were armed civilian men, their weapons nearby or still in the hands. The audio was muted or way too low to hear.